The Lost Winter
by Della19
Summary: They do more than just drink coffee. Moscow, winter and a moment between the ageless. Peggy/Steve, Peggy/Bucky but not really. An interlude from Mono and part 2 of My Stop All the Clocks series.


The Lost Winter

Disclaimer: Still not mine. I worship at the idol of Joss.

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_"A life without changes brings only death."_ – Ancient Proverb

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Peggy spends a month in Moscow after she runs into a dead man in a little café.

She wasn't planning on it-winter is about to explode into full swing, and for all that Peggy loves the snow, Moscow's winters are pushing it. But the discovery of Bucky, alive-of someone like her, someone who carries around the ghost of Steve not only in their mind but in their veins-is something that not even Peggy can pass up, and so she stays, passing time with a man for whom time has passed by.

To say that they only drank coffee would be a lie.

But it would also be easier than the truth.

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It's not an easy thing to be an Englishwoman in Russia now; even less so an American, but Peggy and Bucky manage to pull off being Russian well enough. Peggy's Russian has always been fairly good, and her time in the SSR only helped improve her accents and mannerisms.

Bucky's Russian is perfect, his accent as natural as if he'd been speaking it his whole life, despite the fact that Peggy knows he couldn't speak of word of it during the war.

Peggy worries about that, just a bit.

They don't talk about their pasts-their lives from the war, from Steve, until now-Howard was never really Bucky's friend-they were too much alike to be anything other than competition for Steve's attention, and whenever Peggy tries to ask, Bucky deflects the conversation to something else.

Eventually, Peggy just stops asking.

They do take in the local culture though- Peggy drags him to a performance of _Giselle _as staged by the Imperial Russian Ballet, and then to see Igor Stravinsky's _The Flood_. Bucky retaliates by making her go skating with him on Patriarshiye Ponds, and laughing as she wobbles and falls on her arse while he skates circles around her.

And of course they do other things-they travel around like tourists, visiting Saint Basil's Cathedral, The Spasskaya Tower, and the relatively new Kotelnicheskaya Embankment. They even spar sometimes, and if it's a bit too brutal, a bit too bloody, neither of them ever mentions it.

The bruises are always gone by morning anyways.

And every morning, they go back to the café and sit in silence, sip their coffee and wait for a friend who isn't coming. Sometimes, Peggy thinks of saying something to end this little ritual, which can't be healthy, but in the end she never does.

It isn't like they haven't got the time to waste after all.

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It's a three weeks into her stay in Moscow that she and Bucky take a walk around a local gardens to stare at the snow. Winter is just on the cusp of exploding, but for now only a light dusting of snow and ice cover the ground, and the result is something that glistens and glimmers in the daylight like diamonds.

But it's when they walk over to the Moskva River and stop to take a break that Bucky asks, out of the blue, his eyes guarded as he turns his face to hers, "Do you ever wonder if it was worth it?" And then, when he realizes she doesn't quite understand, "Everything we fought for? Everyone we lost? Was it all worth it?"

"Sometimes, after Steve…" Peggy acknowledges, trailing off, and Bucky nods in acknowledgement before she continues, her voice becoming more certain, "But I know it was in the end. We fought for freedom and liberty, and did what needed to be done to save the lives of millions."

And for all that they did, for all that happened-Steve and everyone else they lost, Peggy finds that she truly means it. Steve believed in truth and justice; in standing up for what was right and never leaving the little guy out, and although she hates that he died, he did so protecting those beliefs, and so although Peggy can't say she doesn't have any regrets, she can say it was all worth it, at least for her.

But because she's getting the idea that he might not feel the same way she asks, her eyes trained to his face, "How about you?"

"I agree with you," he says after a long moment, "It was all worth it," but his gaze is out to the water and not on her, and the tone of his voice tells Peggy that it's a lie.

They don't mention it again-start up their walk again like nothing's happened-but it weighs on Peggy's mind for the rest of the day.

And then that night, Howard calls, and even as Peggy brightens, her attention shifting almost entirely to Howard's voice over the phone, she almost misses how Bucky's face darkens, something cold and resentful appearing only for a second in his eyes before the expression is wiped away.

But only _almost_.

Peggy doesn't sleep much that night for thinking.

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But Peggy doesn't bring it up-he's so good at avoidance by this point that it'd hardly be worth it, and so they carry on as if nothing has changed. And then a few days later a snow squall hits in the morning, and by afternoon the drifts are high enough that they couldn't go anywhere even if they wanted to, and so Peggy puts a few logs on the fireplace and she and Bucky settle down for a quiet evening in the apartment she's been renting.

It's Bucky, naturally, who comes up with the idea of trying to get drunk, saying that the only reason why they haven't been able to do so yet is because they haven't been trying hard enough.

Peggy's always had a hard time resisting a dare.

And it turns out that super-soldier serum has nothing on Russian vodka, because after a few bottles of that, both she and Bucky are completely sauced, and Peggy is almost floating, her mind fuzzy and warm like it hasn't been for years.

And it's in that moment, curled up with Bucky on the small surface of her bed-because the couch is god awful uncomfortable and it's warmer in here-that when Bucky leans towards her and says, breath hot against her lips, "I'm going to do something stupid," Peggy doesn't have the sense to pull away.

He kisses her like he wants to consume her, deep and hot and desperate-kisses her like he's searching for something, and Peggy can only hold on and try to survive the ride, because she hasn't kissed anyone in a decade-since Steve, and this is so far removed from the tenderness that had been the backbone of Steve's kiss, shining through even his desperation.

"You don't taste like him," Peggy whispers when they finally pull back, barely conscious she is saying it, her mouth bruised, strangely sad, the taste of him foreign and heavy on her tongue.

"You do," Bucky whispers back, eyes so dark and complex that if Peggy's mind wasn't so addled from the drink she might be scared of it and of the bitterness in his tone, "But then you would-you were his."

"You were too," Peggy says, voice slurred, eyes drooping with the weight of sleep as she tries to get her point across, because it was always Steve'n'Bucky, best friends against the world, and even Peggy, who Steve was in love with, couldn't have broken what they had.

"Not enough," Peggy thinks she hears him say as she finally loses consciousness and drifts off to sleep, and then something else, but Peggy doesn't know what.

If she had been awake just even one more moment, she would have heard him say, voice tired and resigned, "not enough to save me."

But Peggy is already asleep, and so his words fall on deaf ears.

This too will be one of the great regrets in her life.

But this is hindsight, and so Peggy awakens in the morning to an empty apartment and a cold pillow, a note resting on it that simply reads, _I'm sorry_.

It's then, with the taste of him still bitter on her lips that Peggy realizes that when he said he was going to do something stupid, he wasn't referring to the kiss.

By noon, it's known on certain security channels that Peggy still has contacts in that the Soviet Operative known as the Winter Soldier has been credited with the killing of an American diplomat a small café in Moscow that the man had been frequenting in the morning for the past month.

The same café that Peggy and Bucky have been to every morning, without fail, for the last month.

No one, not the CIA, MI6 or any agency have any leads on the identity of the Winter Soldier.

Peggy doesn't say a word.

Because Peggy knows only too well that without Howard and without her belief in Steve, she'd be exactly like Bucky is, trapped in a body that doesn't change without a way to anchor herself as time passes around her.

There but for the grace of god goes I, after all.

She's on a flight to South America the next day.

She's had quite enough of winter.

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FIN

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A/N: So yeah, this has basically eaten my brain. Mono was just going to be a one-shot, but you were all, 'there needs to be more Bucky,' and then this grabbed me by the throat and refused to let me go until I wrote it! Thanks a lot guys! I'm kidding of course-I love inspiration, which is why I am now going to go and write a Tony finds out Peggy is still alive fic. *Headesk.* Also, for anyone coming a little late to the party, this is in the same universe-I'm calling it my _Stop All The Clocks_ series-as my story Mono, where Peggy and Bucky are ageless because of reasons explained in that fic. And yes, this series is completely Peggy/Steve, this was just something that really stuck with me and because I have a bunch of Winter Solider feels, I wrote this. The title is in reference to John Lennon's famous _Lost Weekend_ because I felt it was pretty apropos for this situation. That said, enjoy, and reviews and constructive criticism are welcome.


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